George III of Britain

George III (4 June 1738-29 January 1820) was the King of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, and Archtreasurer and Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire from 1760 until his death in 1820. A mentally-ill leader, George III was disliked by many and he lost the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783. However, under his rule the British defeated the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 during the Napoleonic Wars.

Biography
George was the son of Prince Frederick of Wales and the grandson of George II of Britain, and was of German and English descent. He was a shy and reserved child but could comment on political events at the age of eight, fluent in both English and German. In 1760 he became King of Britain after the death of his grandfather, and he married Charlotte of Mecklenburg.

George III was disliked by his American colonists because of his rule of taxation of the colonies without their representation in Parliament, and in 1775 he could not prevent a full-scale uprising in the Thirteen Colonies. He used his connections to German princes to "buy" Hessian troops for the American Revolutionary War but in 1778 he also faced France and in 1779 Spain as enemies. He was forced to sign the Treaty of Paris in 1783, making peace and ceding the Thirteen Colonies to the United States.

In the 1790s he saw the French Revolution overthrow Louis XVI of France's government, and he gave refuge to those who might be considered counter-revolutionary. He assisted the First Coalition from 1793 during the French Revolutionary Wars and again supported the enemies of France during the Napoleonic Wars. He was constantly at war with France while the other nations had made peace and intermittently fought, and his navies defeated the French multiple times. In 1812 he fought the United States in the War of 1812, which did practically nothing but lose him some of his finest generals (i.e. Isaac Brock, Edward Pakenham, and Robert Ross) and parts of Florida. George eventually lost power in the British government and was watched over by a regent, his son Prince George of Wales, until he died in 1820.